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Ed Webb

Boris Johnson: The Brezhnev Years | British Politics and Policy at LSE - 0 views

blogs.lse.ac.uk/...ris-johnson-the-brezhnev-years

neoliberalism capitalism UK Britain politics analysis opinion USSR Brexit

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Sep 19 - Cached
  • What makes democracy resilient is its acceptance that we the people, and by extension our governments, are imperfect. The separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary are there to keep the debate continuous, rights protected, and imperfect governments honest as they pursue their current mandate. In totalitarian systems, by contrast, the governing regime justifies itself by a supposedly ‘scientific’ blueprint. The law is reduced to an instrument for the fulfilment of that blueprint.
  • Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, successive governments of New Right and New Left have attempted to implement an asserted science of government based on the radical, free-market neoclassical economics of the Virginia and Chicago Schools: neoliberalism
  • Its dominant idea: that markets are always more efficient; the private is morally and functionally superior to the public
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  • The claims of neoliberalism are based on utopian assumptions; the supply-side revolution has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.
  • When you explore the neoclassical economics at the root of the UK’s neoliberal reforms, it has far more in common with Leninism than with the political economic doctrines of the post-war era. Anglo Keynesianism, German Ordoliberalism and the Swedish Rehn-Meidner models all accepted the realities of radical uncertainty and the incompleteness of human rationality. The affinities between the economic libertarianism of the last forty years and Leninism are rooted in their common dependence on a closed system, machine model of the political economy. Both depend on a hyper-rational conception of human motivation: a perfect utilitarian rationality versus a perfect social rationality.
  • For neoliberals, the state must be subordinated to market mechanisms
  • The more neoliberals embrace their materialist utopia as an infallible science, the higher the tide of unanticipated consequences and systemic failure
  • The Johnson Cabinet is only the most extreme version of successive Conservative cabinets unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes: that neoliberalism does not work in the terms by which it is justified
  • What is problematic for this Cabinet however is that there is no majority social base for their actual project, which is the completion of the supply-side revolution, the creation of a free trade, deregulated, offshore (i.e. tax haven) Britain and the shrinking of the state towards the utopian night-watchman minimum
  • the UK economy has succumbed to a dominant business model in which financial extraction via the maximisation of shareholder value has completely undermined the culture of investment and with it the productive and innovative capacity of the private sector
  • The leaders of the real, productive economy in the UK oppose Brexit in principle and dread ‘No Deal’ as a wilful act of economic self sabotage. The leaders of the financially extractive economy and those who benefit from the really-existing-supply-side-revolution demand Brexit as an opportunity to escape EU regulations that have acted as a brake on their worst excesses.
  • That the extreme economic purpose of Brexit has been successfully conflated with an act of national liberation from tyranny is a product of a skilful charismatic politics, a polarised social media landscape nevertheless driven by conventional media skewed ever further to the right.
  • As the Soviets found, when the popular legitimacy of your actual project is lost, the culture of lies and populist scapegoating becomes your only option. Brexit has offered a cornucopia
  • As in Leninism, the promised withering away of the state under neoliberalism is ultimately a religious utopia: it promises to return us to an Edenic state of nature before the Fall. In the Brezhnev era, the Leninist doctrine became an alibi for the abuses of massively centralised power;  in the neoliberal version the state will likewise fail to wither anywhere. Instead, it will become more completely captured by business and financial interests, with unprecedented abuses of public policy and money to follow.
Ed Webb

Xinjiang's Voiceless Protests Hit Social Media - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...dia-china-uighur-uyghur-tiktok

China xinjiang uighurs socialmedia protest

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Sep 19 - Cached
  • Dozens of videos of people standing solemnly and silently in front of photographs of loved ones who have disappeared have emerged on Douyin, the Chinese original of the popular social media app TikTok. In another subtle message, the videos all play the same mournful song called “Donmek,” which means “return” in Turkish.
  • Between 800,000 and 2 million Uighurs, Kazhaks, and other Muslim ethnic minorities have been detained in China’s northwest region of Xinjiang
  • Uighurs living outside of China have not been spared surveillance and intimidation by the Chinese authorities, but an increasing number are speaking out. In February, a Uighur doctor living in Finland launched the #MeTooUygur social media campaign to demand proof from Beijing that their disappeared loved ones are still alive. The Xinjiang Victims Database collects testimonies from relatives.
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  • “This is the first time we’ve seen a pattern of protest that has made it to the outside world, since the hard turn towards internment and the totalitarian administration of Xinjiang,” said Rian Thum, a historian who has conducted research in Xinjiang for almost two decades. 
  • Both Douyin and TikTok were created by the Beijing-based tech company ByteDance and allow users to create and share short, usually funny video clips. Last November, TikTok became the first Chinese-made app to reach the No. 1 spot on Apple’s App Store in the United States. 
  • Even though the people in the videos remain silent—another giveaway that they are likely still in China—that could still be enough for them to be at great risk
Ed Webb

Another national lockdown - but what is needed more than laws and their enforcement is ... - 0 views

davidallengreen.com/...hat-ministers-now-get-it-right

UK Britain pandemics law politics democracy analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jan 21 - Cached
  • To have effect any laws need to be clear, comprehensible, and accessible.
  • Criminal laws that are not enforced are official fictions.
  • For the lockdown to work in a modern non-totalitarian society, there needs to be consent. In essence: laws and sanctions should only have any effect at the margins, because the mass of the people will do the ‘right thing’ anyway. And this engages the normative issues of legitimacy, accountability, fairness, and credibility.
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  • even laws and sanctions, resources and enforcement, and consent and credibility, are not enough if the underlying policy is not sound – or seen to be sound
  • ministers keep shrugging and crowd-pleasing and getting policy wrong, because they know they can get away with it. In other words: ministers know that a sufficient number of voters do not care enough whether politicians are candid and competent on coronavirus, as with other things.
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